NEW YORK -- Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday that New York City is joining Seattle and Portland in suing the Trump administration for threatening to withhold funds from what it calls “anarchist jurisdictions.”
“What we’ve seen from President Trump, threatening funding for New York City and other cities. It’s morally wrong. It’s legally unacceptable. It’s unconstitutional. And we’re going to fight it,” de Blasio said at his briefing.
The mayor, who threatened to sue weeks ago, said New York is suing the administration in coordination with its sister cities.
the cities are suing over the inclusion of language in an application for federal transit funding that would make the three ineligible because of their designations as "anarchist jurisdictions," a phrase de Blasio describes bluntly as "a figment of Donald Trump's troubled imagination.
"The only anarchy in this country is coming from the White House and it's not anything we've seen from any Democratic or Republican administration ever before and it's madness," he said.
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Jim Johnson, the city’s corporation counsel, said the amount of funding potentially at risk could exceed $12 billion.
Johnson says there's no basis in fact or law for what Washington is trying to do.
"First off they are stepping way over their bounds. Congress controls the power of the purse, not the Trump administration," he said.
Johnson said the Trump administration is moving in a way that is "arbitrary" and "capricious."
The mayor declared, "We'll beat them in court."